okay, so WTH is figure-8 strafing, and why is it more effective?

A good FPS player will make almost all combat decisions using their subconscious mind. This is because decisions that would take several seconds to make using their conscious mind can be made in small fractions of a second by their subconscious mind.

Training the subconscious mind to make these combat decisions is often referred to as muscle memory. You initially make the decision consciously, but every time you make the same decision in response to similar circumstances, you are developing a subroutine in your mind and teaching your subconscious that GÇ£in these circumstances you do thisGÇ¥. Once these subroutines are in place, they will continue to operate until you consciously or subconsciously reprogram it. A subconscious subroutine that helps you in DUST may have been developed when you were playing DOOM 20 years ago.

The best players may not be good teachers because they literally donGÇÖt know what they are doing. To be more precise, they are good because most of their decisions are made by their subconscious mind, allowing them to react 10 times, or maybe even 100 times, faster than someone who has to consciously think about what they should do. But because the decisions are subconscious, they donGÇÖt know they are making them, so in a very real sense, they donGÇÖt know what they are doing. They just do it.

Of course some really good players are also good teachers. There are two ways for a good player to know what they do to be good, in order to teach their methods to others. The first is for them to remember what they did to train themselves. Basically just remembering the subroutines from a time when they still had to think of them consciously, before muscle memory took over. The second is to observe themselves as if they were someone else watching them play, so their conscious mind can see what they do in specific situations, and to observe what works and what does not. A lot of people are not good at this. That is why a lot of competitive gamers will record themselves play, and then watch the recording to see what they did right and what they did wrong. Then they can consciously work on reprogramming their subconscious subroutines to make them better. This is a method often used by sports couches as well.

I believe that I am effective in writing guides partly because I am a slow learner, and partly because I am very self-aware. It takes me a lot more practice to commit decisions to muscle memory, creating those subconscious subroutines, than it would for most people. Being conscious of my decision process longer, and having to practice it more, makes it easier to remember later what I learned and how I learned it. Being self-aware allows me to analyse what I am doing, even after the decision process becomes subconscious. Granted, watching video of myself works even better, and I have done that in other games, but even without video I am fairly good at seeing what I am doing.

Of course the other thing that makes me a good guide writer is an ability to figure out how things work, but that is beyond the topic of this discussion. Here is a link to my Guides if anyone is interested.

So, for a good player to be a good instructor/teacher/coach they need to either remember their own learning process, or be able to analyse exactly what they are doing and why. Because young people learn so quickly, it is quite common for them not to remember their learning process, and to assume that anything they know is inherently obvious and everyone should know it. This is why it is common for young players to show great disdain for less skilled players. Thankfully not all young players show so little insight. Conversely, older players who have been playing video games for a long time may be performing subroutines they learned 10 or 20 years ago, and no longer remember what they did to learn to do what they do. They too can be very intolerant of inexperienced players, although it is less common in older players as wisdom often comes with experience.

There comes a point when a player reaches the limits of their natural talents. Most players stop improving at this point. Some get frustrated when they hit this wall, and quit. Others are quite satisfied to continue to play at that level, particularly if they are more interested in the social aspects of the game than the competitive side. But some are very competitive and realize that to get better they must push beyond their natural talent. These people are the ones who work on being more self-aware, asking themselves GÇ£what am I doing wrong?GÇ¥ and GÇ£how could I do this better?GÇ¥. These are the people who might watch recordings of their play, in order to spot the mistakes they were not aware of.

At the absolute panicle of game play, among the best of the best, you will find two types of people. The first are people with the greatest natural talent. They make terrible coaches. The second are people who got to the top by analyzing and improving everything they do. These people tend to be the best coaches in the game.

Hi Fox, I read a lot of your guides when I was getting started and found them to be a great help and I know a lot of others did too, so I know you're making a point here and I respect that - what you write is true and well reasoned, but from my point of view you are leaving out a very important point....

anyone can become a good instructor with proper training

and that is available from a rl instructor trainer, YT.

all I wanted to say

This is the first FPS game I've ever played. I started January 21st last year. I guess I'm one of the few with natural talent, as I had a 3.0 kdr as a fresh 600k sp scrub-a-dub-dub. (assault player, tried sniping at first with a diff character but didn't work out)

Considering I was good from the start, I can't really share my "rised out of the cess pools of suffering through sheer willpower" story, so I definitely wouldn't make a good instructor lol.

But I make a good squad mate that doesn't mind squading with some fresh blueberrys with <10 hours of gameplay under their belt. Running with other people of my skill level is so easy to the point where it's not even fun.

I will almost always run proto except for the occasional adv fit; I've always preferred high risk high reward, it's the only way to have fun IMO. On top of the fact that my slice of the PC isk comes out to be about 60 mil bi-weekly for pretty much just showing up.

Send me a mail ingame if you want to squad with me, just a warning if our squad is stomping a little too hard I will go back to running solo. I always roll my eyes at the squad leaders in squad finder who go "We got a full 6? PERFECT"

There is no such thing as a subconscious mind, sorry.

At the absolute panicle of game play, among the best of the best, you will find two types of people. The first are people with the greatest natural talent. They make terrible coaches. The second are people who got to the top by analyzing and improving everything they do. These people tend to be the best coaches in the game.

Imagine your character from above, and you are watching. A figure-8 strafe is where you are literally tracing the number 8 on the ground with your movement. There are two methods of this - one is to poisition yourself so that the opponent is as at the "top" of the strafe, and the other places you opponent to the "side" of the strafe. At greater distances, a smaller figure-8 is needed, at closer, a larger figure-8 is needed.

The reason this works is that you are doing two things - you are moving side to side, forcing your opponent to react to the sideways movment, and you are moving forward and back, forcing them to react to new distances (i.e. close the gap, pull back, etc). Either way, they are REACTING to you, and you are controling the engagement. Because you do this, you can better predict where to aim, as you know where your opponent will be in relation to you before and as you are moving, whereas they have to predict (often inaccurately) the right place to shoot. They will often shoot where you were, or falsely predict where you will be.

Changing the pattern so that they are alternately at the "top" or "side" during the same encounter adds complexity to the dance, but also can frustrate your opponent even more.

anyone can become a good instructor with proper training

This is very untrue.


in your opinion?

This coming from an individual who has very extensive experience as a coach, personal trainer, and group fitness instructor.

in your opinion?

and extensive formal training as an instructor trainer, no doubt? That would be more to the point.

@zaaeed, I sort of agree, there are people who are naturally cut out for being teachers/trainers, but there is also multiple types of instructors.

For example, there is hands on teachers/instructors (teach through experience), or there is more passive instructors (ones who wrote guides/instructions)

I for one find I'm better at the latter

while I agree that not all good players make good teachers, I don't think the opposite works, that some bad players are good teachers...

I do find validity in the old adage "those who can't do, teach" purely from an academic point of view, and I believe you fit in this category fox, but you have a much better chance of finding a good player who can teach more than a bad player could percentage wise... a bad player may learn from a book how to do something, but if he/she fails in demonstrating it's application the lesson is only half learned.

but this thread was an interesting piece of philosophy none the less.

okay, so WTH is figure-8 strafing, and why is it more effective?

Imagine your character from above, and you are watching. A figure-8 strafe is where you are literally tracing the number 8 on the ground with your movement. There are two methods of this - one is to poisition yourself so that the opponent is as at the "top" of the strafe, and the other places you opponent to the "side" of the strafe. At greater distances, a smaller figure-8 is needed, at closer, a larger figure-8 is needed.

The reason this works is that you are doing two things - you are moving side to side, forcing your opponent to react to the sideways movment, and you are moving forward and back, forcing them to react to new distances (i.e. close the gap, pull back, etc). Either way, they are REACTING to you, and you are controling the engagement. Because you do this, you can better predict where to aim, as you know where your opponent will be in relation to you before and as you are moving, whereas they have to predict (often inaccurately) the right place to shoot. They will often shoot where you were, or falsely predict where you will be.

Changing the pattern so that they are alternately at the "top" or "side" during the same encounter adds complexity to the dance, but also can frustrate your opponent even more.

interesting, I agree that some decisions are made subconsciously, but at least for me they are things that can't really be taught or vary between people and builds. pathing and damage management are all but automatic but the in and out of combat is very much deliberate and conscience.

reloads... god reloading, reloading is something that is so automated that i can't turn it off. sometimes i find myself reloading in the middle of a fight and just think "why am I reloading now?" and the answer comes back in CoD 4 and the later MW games emptying the mag added a couple frames to the reload animation so I never ran the mag dry.

Thanks for the details.
My analytical mind still says there's something missing from the explanation, though. Because if that's all there was to it, the results should be identical to circle strafing, where you just roll the left stick around in a circle.
After all, that gets you "moving side to side", and it also gets you "moving forward and back".

I'm guessing it may be because, when someone tries the figure-8 style, it also makes the movement less smooth, compared to simply rolling the stick around the circle borders.
So it's not REALLY "figure-8". (which implies a smooth motion along an 8-track, similar to smooth motion in a circle).
it's more "uneven unpredictable strafe".

Sound about right?

As much as I hate to add to the derailment of my own thread, I think that the figure 8 is a way of adding another layer of complexity to trick your opponentGÇÖs subconscious while still being easy enough to do without thinking about it, once you have practised it that is.

Circle strafing is common enough that many people have learned to compensate for it. Their subconscious is going GÇ£ok, they were going left, now they are backing up, they are about to go right now...GÇ¥. This causes them to shift their aim to the right just as you continue left again in your figure 8 pattern. This should happen at least once before they realize that you are doing a figure 8 strafe and not a circle strafe, and that gives you at least one good chance to brake their aim assist lock. If they are more used to seeing circle strafing than figure 8 strafing, you may trick them several times.

And as you say, with it being a more complex pattern there is likely going to be more variance, making it less predictable.